Datadog acquires Quickwit

https://quickwit.io/blog/quickwit-joins-datadog

by lrx • 2 years ago

296 115 2 years ago

bk146• 2 years ago

Curious what Datadog is going to build with this tech. Believe this company pitching themselves as OSS competitor to Datadog a few months ago.

okbro• 2 years ago

Based on the [press release](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-quickwit/) it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model for customers that can't use pure SaaS solutions due to regulations:

Organizations in financial services, insurance, healthcare, and other regulated industries must meet stringent data residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements while maintaining full visibility into their systems. This becomes challenging when logs need to remain at rest in customers’ environments or specific regions, hindering teams’ ability to attain seamless observability and insight. To help our customers meet these requirements without sacrificing visibility or introducing multiple logging tools, we are pleased to announce that Quickwit—a popular open source distributed search engine—is joining Datadog.

everfrustrated4• 2 years ago

it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model

That makes sense. Datadog has been pure SaaS the whole time, which is unusual. Buying a good db engine like Quickwit would be a smart head-start into the on-prem segment which is a natural expansion opportunity.

I've previously made the prediction that Datadog is the new Cisco - can expect lots of acquisitions to be made going forward.

spamizbad2• 2 years ago

We switched from Datadog to Grafana (do not recommend unless they got you over a barrel on pricing and you need to escape) and one nice thing Grafana gives you is the ability to self-host for local development so you can even run integration tests against your observability... an edge case need but if you need it you're glad it has it.

winrid2• 2 years ago

I could only imagine they want to replace their existing infra with this as a potential cost saving measure.

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

And then I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto customers given the current crazy high prices.

zerd• 2 years ago

The architecture of Husky seems fairly similar to quickwit. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-husky... https://quickwit.io/docs/main-branch/overview/architecture

politelemon• 2 years ago

A larger bill for enterprise customers.

everfrustrated4• 2 years ago

Pretty clear they want it to keep a moat on their side. Can't see Datadog continuing investing in this - it's a pretty direct competitor.

What happened to Vector the last opensource they bought? Are they still hired?

ripley12• 2 years ago

(disclaimer: Datadog employee)

I haven't kept super close tabs on it but last year we were hiring for a role to do tech lead stuff and OSS community building for Vector, and yes several of the original Vector employees still work here.

bfung2• 2 years ago

(Disclaimer: also datadog employee)

I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now currently am the manager for the Community Open Source Engineering team that works on Vector open source.

Just confirming strongly what ripley12 said, as a person with direct involvement in OSS at Datadog.

slt20212• 2 years ago

arguably they acquired them so they dont build anything further with this tech, as it threatens renewals of their existing enterprise contracts

hijinks• 2 years ago

they are planning to allow you to run your logs in your own datacenter/cloud and put something like a proxy there or being built into quickwit that your logs show up in the datadog UI

My guess is you will be billed per gig or something but not nearly the cost of shipping your logs to DD

Hixon10• 2 years ago

It's a bit sad that many modern databases were recently acquired. They had the potential to bring a lot of innovations.

1. https://www.warpstream.com/

2. https://www.orioledb.com/

3. https://quickwit.io/

oliverrice2• 2 years ago

(disclaimer: supabase employee)

OrioleDB continues to be a fully open source and liberally licensed. We're working with the OrioleDB team to provide an initial distribution channel so they can focus on the storage engine vs hosting + providing lots of user feedback/bug reports. Our shared goal is to advance OrioleDB until it becomes the go-to storage engine for Postgres, both on Supabase and everywhere else.

Happy to hear any concerns you have

chrisweekly3• 2 years ago

Please forgive and help remedy my ignorance: it's a coherent goal to want OrioleDB to be the go-to storage engine for Postgres, on Supabase?

philippemnoel2• 2 years ago

Acquisitions don't necessarily mean the end of innovation. Sometimes, it allows them to take innovations they've worked hard on for years and expand the reach to a significantly larger audience :)

I have met the founders of all 3 of these companies and can assure you they all care tremendously about bringing their work to the world.

ParadeDB is independent and without plans to sell anytime soon, though :)

hobs2• 2 years ago

Not hating on Quickwit, but almost never does an acquisition in the modern era mean continual innovation, most companies are now suborned to a greater purpose, and its almost never going to drive them to build the best thing they already have ended their lifecycle - nobody is going to buy them from DD and their quality/dev process will dominate, and that is of a decent size corporation.

It also looks like most of DD's observability acquisitions are either integrated directly (seemingly with a full rewrite) or look a lot like aquihires for senior folks, so I wouldn't hold my breath here.

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit (228 points, 6 months ago, 195 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701

Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog (145 points, 1 year ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042

slt20212• 2 years ago

* note to myself: build a successful product that threatens large slow moving legacy provider and get quickly acqui-hired

stevage• 2 years ago

Is that not the standard disruption play?

aseipp2• 2 years ago

Well, it looks like Quickwit was going to add an Enterprise license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they're instead going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue on":

We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon release a major update of both Quickwit with a relicense to Apache License 2.0 and tantivy.

So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down? It has been pretty nice and stable in my experience, so I can't really complain much. But I was really looking forward to what else it could bring.

Congrats to the team, in any case!

mindcrash2• 2 years ago

"So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down?"

They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves, probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license in the hopes that the community picks up the tab.

I think that's a nice trade. Could have been much worse.

By the way, also note that DD is not a total stranger in the OSS space. They actually opensourced their observability pipeline tooling for general use as Vector, which is a rock solid product. - https://vector.dev/

everfrustrated4• 2 years ago

They bought Vector - it was always opensource

Dylan1312• 2 years ago

Vector was already OSS when they acquired the company that created it, timber.

https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-timber-techn...

aseipp2• 2 years ago

Yes, I've been using Vector since very early on, long before Datadog acquired it, and Datadog have continued ongoing maintenance and feature additions at a slow-but-steady pace, which I think is good. Like Quickwit, Vector is very stable and already quite complete. So I'm not too unhappy.

But Vector is something that complements Datadog's offering very well, so I think that makes sense for them to be good stewards of it. Quickwit is something that somewhat actively competes against them, which is a big difference. I suspect that unlike Vector, Quickwit is probably going to stop seeing any development in pretty short order, unless the devs now can consciously go out of their way to dedicate extra hours to it.

To be clear, I think that the relicense is great, and I think it's very possible that Quickwit will be picked up/forked by someone and maintenance will continue, because it's very good, and I'd really love to see someone do metrics for it as well. So, I'm not all gloomy or anything like that.

psanford• 2 years ago

Happy that Quickwit is going to Apache 2. Sad that the team won't be working on it anymore.

I loved that I was able to setup Quickwit on AWS lambda and have a good cloud based search engine for $0.01 / month.

o0-0o• 2 years ago

Interesting comment. Any thoughts on what you can use now?

winrid2• 2 years ago

The same thing? The community will maintain it

francoismassot• 2 years ago

Co-founder of Quickwit here. Seeing our acquisition by Datadog on the HN front page feels like a truly full-circle moment.

HN has been interwoven with Quickwit's journey from the very beginning. Looking back, it's striking to see how our progress is literally chronicled in our HN front-page posts:

- Searching the web for under $1000/month [0]

- A Rust optimization story [1]

- Decentralized cluster membership in Rust [2]

- Filtering a vector with SIMD instructions (AVX-2 and AVX-512) [3]

- Efficient indexing with Quickwit Rust actor framework [4]

- A compressed indexable bitset [5]

- Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog [6]

- Quickwit 0.8: Indexing and Search at Petabyte Scale [7]

- Tantivy – full-text search engine library inspired by Apache Lucene [8]

- Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit [9]

- Datadog acquires Quickwit [10]

Each of these front-page appearances was a milestone for us. We put our hearts into writing those engineering articles, hoping to contribute something valuable to our community.

I'm convinced HN played a key role in Quickwit's success by providing visibility, positive feedback, critical comments, and leads that contacted us directly after a front-page post. This community's authenticity and passion for technology are unparalleled. And we're incredibly grateful for this.

Thank you all :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955461

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190586

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674040

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35785421

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519467

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756367

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492834

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648043

nextaccountic• 2 years ago

I think you forgot to add the links

Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is a great feature of open source)

Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open helps Datadog's bottom line?

dangoodmanUT• 2 years ago

I love quickwit, unfortunately datadog has a history of murdering open source (e.g. vector.io halting development and never fixing gross bugs)

philippemnoel2• 2 years ago

pg_search dev here -- Thanks for mentioning us.

Re: Tantivy. I'm hopeful the community Paul and the Quickwit team have built on top of Tantivy will continue to flourish. I'm sure Datadog will build product(s) with Quickwit, which is built on Tantivy and will contribute to it. Many other companies like ours (ParadeDB) and other databases also integrate it. I can't speak for others, but we'll contribute whenever possible. We're currently working on supporting nested documents in Tantivy, for example, and hoping to upstream this work.

While it's reasonable to be concerned, I'd say this is a win for Quickwit, Tantivy and, of course, the well-deserving team behind them.

adeptima3• 2 years ago

Congratulations! The fact you and your team managed to built Tantivy is a huge contribution to open source.

As someone who never managed to built a fond relationship with Apache Lucene based products (Solf, Elastic). I was extremely happy to see Tantivy in open source.

BM25 scoring, proper asian language support, speed, memory foot prints, etc - amazing job! Thank you so much!

https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy

IMHO Datadog made a smart move!

If Tantivy itself just stays permanently under Apache2 licence and find a sustainable path to co exist with the rest of open source community - it's all good guys. You are more than deserve a commercial success.

blinded• 2 years ago

Congrats!!

jhgg• 2 years ago

Hoping this leads to datadog launching a logging solution that does not cost an arm and a leg at scale.

iandanforth• 2 years ago

Honestly this is my only criticism of datadog. The product is great but good lord that pricing.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

Based on my experience with them, this isn't a technical or product issue, but a cultural one. (DD is very sales-driven, in a bad way)

maxwellg• 2 years ago

Mezmo recently put in production Quickwit to serve thousands of customers and petabytes of logs, drastically reducing infrastructure cost and complexity while delivering the same user experience.

I can't imagine they feel great about Quickwit getting bought by a competitor after that.

PittleyDunkin• 2 years ago

It's a risk you deal with giving back to open source.

The good part for the rest of us is it's a signal that there's likely some appetite for a fork if Datadog screws the pooch.

sealeck• 2 years ago

Either they did it on their own, in which case that's open source for you, or they have some kind of contract with quickwit, in which case I'd be really surprised if they don't have some clauses which handle this.

liminal• 2 years ago

We just moved from Elastic to Quickwit. Sigh. What other open source, object storage backed logging databases do people recommend?

tdubey• 2 years ago

Loki by Grafana Labs is nice (https://grafana.com/oss/loki/). There was a time (3+ years ago) where the product was changing pretty rapidly and much of the documentation was on git, so we had a few headaches doing minor version bumps, but I believe its much more mature now.

ed_mercer• 2 years ago

Just don’t look at the list of open issues and the lack of responses.

mcpeepants• 2 years ago

Loki is significantly different in several ways, including the lack of full-text indexing.

valyala2• 2 years ago

Loki has the following problems:

- It is non-trivial to setup and operate. It requires properly configuring and orchestrating numerous components - distributor, ingestor, querier, query frontend, compactor, consul, ruler, memcache, index service, etc. - see https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/architectur...

- Its' configs tend to break with every new release, since some configs become obsolete and some configs change names and/or structure.

- It is very slow on "needle in the haystack" queries such as "search for logs containing some rarely seen trace_id", since it needs to read, unpack and scan all the logs at object storage. This may be also very expensive if the object storage service charges for read IO.

- It doesn't support log fields with big number of unique values (aka high-cardinality log fields). It you'll try storing logs with high-cardinality fields into Loki, then it will quickly explode with enormous RAM usage. Recent Loki releases provide half-baked solution for this problem - "structured metadata" ( https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/labels/stru... ), but it is still experimental and requires non-trivial configs (aka it doesn't work).

makeavish2• 2 years ago

I suggest giving SigNoz a try. Built on top of Clickhouse, it’s fast and scalable

https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz

PS: I am maintainer at SigNoz

tonyhart7• 2 years ago

what another open source you can recommend ?

valyala2• 2 years ago

Take a look at VictoriaLogs - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/ . It is a single small executable, which runs out of the box with the default configs (e.g. it is zero-config) and stores all the data into a single directory (support for object storage coming soon).

scop2• 2 years ago

I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda up and running" blog wrapped in a stand up comedy routine hawked by a Datadog employee who made sure to tell us he was a Datadog employee. Get us all drunk and happy and think Datadog is cool.

Genuine question: has the company changed enough in the interim to deserve a second look?

orf• 2 years ago

What does any of that have to do with the actual product?

scop2• 2 years ago

It made me extremely distrustful of any and all interactions I would have with an employee. Is every email I send to my rep going to turn into an upsell? Are they being straight with me in answering my question?

film42• 2 years ago

The product itself is very good, but the sales process is truly awful. Random calls with non-technical reps unable to answer basic questions like, "now that you've added this to my GCP account for 2 weeks, how much is this going to cost?" They'd say they're not sure but they have a startup deal with $xxxx minimum commit for 12 months gets you two months of extra trial, cancel anytime no questions asked. It's not just bad, it's comically bad.

ipaddr• 2 years ago

That is their product. You want to cancel? Send the army of clowns.

baobun• 2 years ago

Different person with similar stance: Those specific examples? Whatever.

We did get absolutely burnt by other manifestations of the DataDog approach: The billing model was (is?) very much not good, transparent or predictable and staying on top of costs was close to a nightmare. The way surprise costs and contract changes (triggered by them) was handled did not feel honest.

The product itself is great but from my perspective it's absolutely not worth having to deal with their business side of things and the risks, costs (money, time, attention) and stress associated.

If I were a Quickwit customer I'd start looking for alternatives.

chronotis• 2 years ago

For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and account relationship process is just as important of a factor now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.

Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active customer.

Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes to replatform our workload just to not have to have those unending inbound calls.

NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it to.

tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product

adeptima3• 2 years ago

There are multiple possible outcomes from the merge with Datadog.

As my ex manager once told - there is no such thing as nice people in P&L statement. Someone has to pay

It's very easy to be anxious and see the path to the dark side here.

However one of possible outcomes - there will be a valid open source competitor to Grafana ecosystems, and this along secure the rest of scene from relicensing. There is a chance it will be all win-win with clear sustainable path and no money and power struggles for founders.

I want to stay on the positive here. Time will show.

paulryanrogers• 2 years ago

Is Grafana and its ecosystem no longer open source? I haven't used it in a while

pranay012• 2 years ago

there will be a valid open source competitor to Grafana ecosystems

You may want to check out SigNoz [1] - takes a all in one app approach compared to different modules for each signal approach which Grafana takes

Disclaimer : I am one of the maintainers

[1] https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz

datavirtue2• 2 years ago

The name is perfect, Data DOG.

Justin_K• 2 years ago

I have had the opposite experience. Sales has been really respectful of our time.

rr808• 2 years ago

Get us all drunk and happy

Damn I never get sales pitches like that.

thebruce87m• 2 years ago

Agreed. Once they had a whiff of our domain every engineer was being bombarded with emails like “Re: meeting next week”.

dirtshell• 2 years ago

Do any engineers actually like DD? Execs/managers seem to love DD and get upsold all the time on it and ask engineers to implement some of their half-baked features. It seems like its good for alerts and dashboards for infrastructure teams. But as an engineer its a pain and using it for log analysis is much more annoying than just tracking down the actual relevant logs and grepping.

geraldwhen• 2 years ago

Large json logs just won’t appear for hours, which makes it so fun to debug issues in deployed environments!

Showing ALL the logs isn’t cool. Showing SOME logs at random is cool.

SteveNuts• 2 years ago

My biggest issue with them is the absolutely, hilariously, ridiculously expensive custom metrics.

everfrustrated4• 2 years ago

Easily the best product in its category. The value is in APM/tracing - if you're just using it for logs you're missing a lot.

If you're used to traditional Enterprise pricing it's fairly priced for the value you get but anybody coming from self-funded or VC it's very expensive. If you're already using Splunk you can afford it.

One of its best features is it's consumption priced not by seats so easy to open up for all of eng including product/QA teams and not just devs to use which is great for breaking down barriers.

It's a bit like aws in that it's a platform - use of one product tends to encourage using more from their suite.

xtracto• 2 years ago

Second this.

I used to log large apps using kibana and elastic search. Also using the clusterfuck that are all AWS tries at this (cloud watch, log insights.amd whatnot).

Nothing compares to what DD give you in observability.

Having said that, DD should only be an AWS feature. They should buy them for a couple of billions and integrate it as a service for all of AWS infrastructure.

hobs2• 2 years ago

Which just meant that when the business had sticker shock they just disabled all the useful features of DD which consumed so much.

datavirtue2• 2 years ago

It's just a solution to garbage distributed cloud service logs and devs that don't know how to log an application.

hackernoops2• 2 years ago

DD is the Oracle/SAP of o11y. Scumbags that kill innovation.

jitl• 2 years ago

It’s good, I like it. I don’t use the logs product (we splunk) but I’m big fan of the automatic profiling and trace/span stuff. It’s like 50% better UX compared to other tools I’ve tried. But it’s expensive enough we’re always thinking about moving off it. That will be a very sad day for me.

acaloiar• 2 years ago

The clock begins counting down to Datadog figuring out how to charge per node, cpu, container, RAM (KB), and unicode characters indexed.

Too• 2 years ago

Isn't this what they already do? Log pricing is per ingested GB and monitoring is charged per node.

Hilift• 2 years ago

They have to though, right? If you look at the nonsense people generate in logs, it would be a war crime to not monetize that. 20% of the PB's of data is probably the same 2,100 UTF-16 characters of Windows event id 4624.

hdjjhhvvhga• 2 years ago

They already do. For example, for containers you have 5 per host included in the Pro plan (I have more in my hobby projects...) and then you pay extra for each. Their pricing model is quite complex and with time you start to wonder if all these nice features are really worth that high prices.

propter_hoc3• 2 years ago

This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round.

Rhetorically, why was it time for this?

Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they can mark up the value on their portfolio, or if the market isn't hot enough for a high-priced Series A, force an exit.

bomewish• 2 years ago

Practically, what happens if the founders don’t want to play ball? VCs can muscle up and force a sale on worse terms? Just not clear how much of what goes on is asking nicely vs coercion, and where the actual leverage lies.

maccard2• 2 years ago

It’s going to depend on what the terms you agreed to are. In my experience, the company leadership are free to suggest an alternative to the hyper growth plan, but the board (which you likely won’t have a majority on) will reject it. VC’s don’t care about recouping money, they’d rather you fired everyone, pivoted, and started again and tried again with the money you have. They want successful exits, not break evens. It’s not about money it’s about reputation.

If you suggest something they don’t like, they’ll stall until you run out of money, or force you out.

Rastonbury• 2 years ago

You're a founder who raised seed and now appear to be hitting PMF and making repeatable sales, won't you raise A to scale?

propter_hoc3• 2 years ago

Is that a rhetorical question, or aimed at me specifically?

Regardless, in my case, it's not my first rodeo; I didn't give up any board seats or majority control. I mostly raised from angels that I know personally and trust me. And we're a high-margin B2B business (apparently similar in those limited respects to Quickwit) so I don't feel particularly capital constrained without raising additional rounds.

So I don't have a board pushing me for "valuation events." But I am very familiar with this toxic dynamic from my previous experience.

maccard2• 2 years ago

why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech.

Remember that this is a decision you make when you accept the seed money, not when it comes to looking for further money. If you want to build a profitable growing company, bc funding is not the path to that.

satvikpendem2• 2 years ago

Depends, if you have a majority on the board you can do whatever you want. Some companies get a seed round to then use that to bootstrap to profitability and growth over time.

fulmicoton2• 2 years ago

Our seed round was 100% made of SAFE, so VCs did not have the power to force us to do anything.

The sentence in the blog post is a tad misleading. I suspect François is not really talking about VCs that had already invested in quickwit, but about the usual flow of other VCs who contacted us, to know about the company and be part of our eventual series A.

It just generally felt like we were "at a crossing".

No one twisted our arm.

propter_hoc3• 2 years ago

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for jumping to an incorrect conclusion based on vague wording. (I would edit my comment accordingly but I can't anymore.)

hackernoops2• 2 years ago

I integrated Quickwit into our o11y platform. It was great tech with lots of promise, and now it's dead. Yet another reason to never do business with Datahog.

morelish• 2 years ago

How much did they get acquired for?

seaghost2• 2 years ago

Sqreen was a great product for startups. Unfortunately acquired by the Datadog. Product was never fully integrated into their offerings and there is no such alternative.

Moutiix• 2 years ago

Hey I'm an engineer who worked at Sqreen and now Datadog. What kind of feature is still missing in Datadog ASM? To my knowledge everything is there except managing CSP and security headers now.

seaghost2• 2 years ago

Few months ago when I’ve tried it there was no full support for ruby language.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

Come on this is HN, the news / link aggregator of a VC: tell us how much the exit was in $$$ ;-)

Datadog acquires Quickwit

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